Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany. By Rebecca BrennerGraham. New York: Citadel Press, 2025. 328 pp. $29.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978‐0‐80‐654317‐8

Dear Miss Perkins, by Rebecca Brenner Graham, aims to tell the story, as the subtitle suggests, of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and how she attempted to influence immigration and refugee policy during the 1930s when most would be migrants to the United States faced a firmly shut door. Graham contends that Perkins has been overlooked by historical narratives of the period, even though she was and is renowned as the first woman to hold a Cabinet position. The book explicitly lauds Perkins as an unsung hero whose efforts on behalf of refugees from Nazism can serve as inspiration to those fighting xenophobia, racism, nativism, and antisemitism today. There is little question that Perkins was an important figure whose contributions to many key pieces of the New Deal tended toward the more progressive end of legislation on behalf of workers. There is ample recognition of her role within the huge scholarly literature on the New Deal, which generally sees Perkins as an example of the (gendered) pipeline from social work and labor organizing to official political power that characterized a number of other key figures in FDR's administration. Graham suggests that because there have been so few biographies of Perkins that the Secretary of Labor has been silenced. However, that is not really the case for Perkins any more than for other influential women of the period who are not as well known as they should be. What Dear Miss Perkins does offer is an account of a different element of Perkins's work, her supervision of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was part of the Department of Labor for most of her tenure as Secretary of Labor. In this role, Perkins was in the position to create and carry out liberal policies with a real impact on refugees and migrants during a period when other government agencies—and the general public—remained resolutely opposed to changes that might allow more “undesirables” into a country suffering severe economic depression. Graham explains the ways in which Perkins and likeminded INS officials worked with groups like the German-Jewish Children's Aid to admit some young refugees (though they were unsuccessful in getting the Wagner-Rogers Act passed, a legislative act that would have admitted many more). She looks at a few case studies of Perkins's use of repeated visa extensions to protect Germans and Austrians already in the US from being forced to return home, with the Trapp Family Singers as one notable example. The book also looks at Perkins's ultimate inability to crack the gates open, including a failed proposal to admit refugee Jews to Alaska (a dubious project of colonization) and eventually the removal of INS to the Department of Justice, where hostile officials were determined to restrict non-quota immigration regardless of the clearly exigent circumstances of the day. All of these are indeed stories worth telling. It is unfortunate, however, that Dear Miss Perkins is so flawed. Although Graham certainly did do some archival research for what is clearly a labor of love, much of the book is based on secondary sources, including a few rather hagiographic biographies. The project's origins as her undergraduate thesis are evident in the somewhat simplistic conception and muddled organization of the book, which could have used a significantly heavier editorial hand. Graham layers on a theoretical vocabulary related to settler colonialism that clouds the prose and poorly matches the content. There is a great deal of repetition, sometimes within paragraphs or on the same page. An egregious example is found in the countless references to the attempted impeachment of Perkins over the proposed deportation of an alleged Communist labor organizer, both before and after the chapter devoted to this subject (Perkins opposed the deportation but was left politically weakened by the unsuccessful impeachment attempt). The repetition leads the reader to question whether there is quite enough material here for a book-length study. The authorial voice shifts throughout the book, with Graham sometimes slipping into first person and in the final chapters (purportedly on historical memory) occasionally invoking the experiences and memories of friends and family instead of sticking to the historical record. The chapter on how Frances Perkins has been remembered contains some interesting tidbits but is almost entirely uncritical narrative. The final chapters on the legacy of the Holocaust in the US and the impact of American immigration law slip quickly into (well-intended) advocacy rather than analysis. There are numerous missed opportunities here. Scholarship on the American government's persistent failure to aid refugees from Nazi Germany by loosening up immigration restrictions have largely focused on the documented antisemitism of the State Department. In identifying other government entities as additional harbors for antisemitic policy, Dear Miss Perkins suggests ample areas for further research, particularly on the INS, which will require much more archival digging than provided here. Graham also seems not to know about important recent historiography on antisemitism, legal systems, and the American state (by Kirsten Fermaglich and Britt Tevis, among others) that could—and should—provide an important context for this book. Overall, Graham is right to direct greater attention to Perkins and especially to the internal administrative politics of the Roosevelt administration and their impact on policy decisions related to immigrants and refugees at a fraught moment in world history. However, Dear Miss Perkins is not entirely successful in carrying out that project. Future scholars will need to conduct much more intensive research and to provide greater contextualization and thesis-driven critical analysis of both Perkins's successes and failures in reforming a hostile immigration environment. The author declares no conflicts of interest.